Richard Mott's first foray into hospitality was in the 1980s at the University of Chicago, where he started running a coffee shop in the basement of the business school when he was a grad student. By the time he graduated, he helped grow that single coffee shop into four locations across campus. He's a longtime Chicago-based restaurateur and his farm-to-table restaurant North Pond has been around since the late 1990s. Lately, he's expanded his business to include Spark Shared Kitchen, a catering facility and incubator for food entrepreneurs. He knows a lot about the practical economics of restaurants and hospitality at large, and in his decades-long career in the Chicago scene he's seen about everything. On our recent trip to Chicago, we sat down with Mott to talk about the ever-increasing price of food and labor, why diners are drinking less, and the expected and unexpected reasons that restaurants so often fail.

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In 1776, the field of economics was born with the publication of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. And among the book's earliest readers, and most ardent advocates, was a Regency-era novelist named Maria Edgeworth. In her time, Edgeworth was one of the most famous literary figures in England, and she smuggled into her stories economic concepts and debates around rent seeking, the idea of productive labor, and so on. These works were enormously influential and they helped expose a generation to practical applications of Smith's new theories. Yet when you read about the history of economics, Edgeworth's name is hardly ever mentioned. Jeanna Smialek, a veteran reporter and the Brussels bureau chief at The New York Times, thinks Edgeworth's name needs to be placed back in the pantheon of economic history. On this episode, we speak with Smialek about her biography, The Invisible Hand of Maria Edgeworth, and we discuss Edgeworth's friendly debates with the likes of Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo, how the Irish potato famine reshaped economic thought, and how Edgeworth used the novel form to educate the masses on the value of economics.

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In September, Gallup released a poll that showed that 43% percent of Americans viewed socialism positively, the highest approval since Gallup began the poll back in 2010. Since Zohran Mamdani won the NYC mayoral election, the left has made a number of gains across national politics. Still, the majority of Americans view socialism negatively, according to Gallup. As a longtime DSA member and veteran of leftist media, Bhaskar Sunkara is one of socialism's leading advocates, and he's spent much of his career charting what a socialist economy in America might look like. Unlike some other leftists, he believes the market has a place. In fact, he thinks markets and entrepreneurs are an objective good in society. He proposes a vision of so-called "market socialism" in his recent co-authored book The Blueprint, and he lays out this system for us in today's episode. We talk about how many features of capitalism — from small businesses to monetary policy — might be remade under socialist principles.

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